Welcome to the Q&A Forum

Thanks Ben!

Thanks Ben!  I just started with Wistia, but I am blown away...and that is after I had high expectations from SEOMoz and the likes.

What happens if I edit the transcript? Will it still highlight properly if I do a word for word swap?

Wistia has a feature that allows you to have them create a transcript for your video that highlights the words as the video progress, kind of like Karaoke.

I am just playing with implementing this feature, but am not sure whether Google can index the transcript within the Wistia player (see code in link below).  Currently I have the Wistia transcript for auto-highlighting functionality AND my manually typed static transcript at the bottom of the page.

Should I incorporate both or will Google see the Wistia transcript?

Thanks for the in depth response.  We just had a marketing meeting last Friday where we used your slide presentation on this topic as a reference.

I think the best thing my friends can do is just put themselves out there and film the videos themselves.  They have the technical know-how, they just need to get over being camera shy.

I am trying to help a friend add quality content to their site.  It's been determined that video is a great medium for much of it.  However, their budget and time is limited.  Here are some ideas I've had so far and comments on each.

Outsource to a budget production company

Pros: $500/min or less (I hope), time saving

Cons: Quality, possibly boring

Sock Puppets

Pros: Doable in-house, creative and engaging, multiple characters possible for a conversation rather than 1 actor

Cons: Does not fit the corporate theme/feel of the site

GoAnimate Cartoon Animations

Pros: Doable in-house or hired creator at $500/min or less, creative and engaging, multiple characters possible for a conversation rather than 1 actor

Cons: Off-limits, as this is being utilized by a subsidiary partner site that we need to differentiate from

Slideshow Video

Pros: Doable in-house, no actors required

Cons: Possibly boring, only suitable for certain topics

Does anyone have any additional ideas to throw out there or comments on how to implement the above in a suitable way for this corporate site?

I'm still seeing an error page at the top of the list with the url of http://www.jwsuretybonds.com:443/

Are there any negative effects of this?

Thank you both for clarifying!

If you only share the video, not the page, then where does the FB like point back to?  My site or Wistia's?

It might be splitting hairs, but I would imagine having them share the page is more beneficial, as you control everything around the video, including calls-to-action, other recommended videos, etc.

Perhaps I'm misinterpreting this?

I noticed that SEOMoz does not make use of Wistia's social sharing buttons such as a Facebook Like button.

Is there any disadvantage to using the like button via Wistia rather than copy/pasting it in static HTML?

I want to use Wistia for my video CDN for it's obvious SEO/analytics benefits.  However, I want to be able to display my videos in the best fashion for usability.

I believe the NY Times did an excellent job in doing this: http://video.nytimes.com/  They have a section for recommended videos, a list of most viewed, etc.

I see that Wistia allows you to create categories, which they call "Projects", but I don't see anything in regards to displaying lists of most viewed or related videos.

I don't want to recreate the wheel and am assuming someone must have coded this already.  Is there an open source or perhaps paid license I can obtain to display Wistia videos with the layout I described above?

When I search our company website using the Google site search function "site:jwsuretybonds.com", a 400 Bad Request page is at the top of the listed pages.

I had someone else at our company do the same site search and the 400 Bad Request did not appear.

Is there a reason this is happening, and are there any ramifications to it?

Thanks for the input!

I think you make some good points.  What you recommended is precisely what our current plan was for the new site.  I just didn't know if there is any other decent options.  You've given me a bit more confidence that we are going in the right direction.  Thanks.

I have some large html data tables that look horrible (see bottom of http://www.jwsuretybonds.com/surety-bonds/commercial-bonds/auto_dealer_bond.htm).  To my surprise, heat map tests actually proved them to be useful in improving our conversion rates to get visitors to apply for the bond they need.  We are looking at ways to better the user experience while still keeping the data visible to search spiders.  One idea was to use a dropdown list to filter by states.

With new web technologies, there must be a better way to utilize this data.  What are some alternatives?

I found a smart search suggestion plugin that looks amazing and thought I'd see if anyone has experience with it.  www.suggest.io looks like a great usability improvement and even helps to do keyword research with what your visitors are searching on your site.

I'm excited about it and feel like it is too good to be true.  Does anyone have experience with this plugin or something similar?

Excellent advice!  Thank you so much.

Our web designer wants to change our pages from the .htm to .html extension.  Would 301 redirects transfer our link juice to rankings are not harmed?

This is good advice for checking to see if it counts at all, but I guess there is no way to definitively know whether date in a table trumps a dropdown without A/B testing.

Not yet.  We are still designing wireframes.

I am wondering if the data in a combobox like below would count as unique data:

http://miamicoder.com/wp-content/uploads/2009/03/image_12.png (possible new display)

We currently have our data displayed in HTML <tables>that I don't believe to be as user friendly, but do count as unique content.</tables>

http://www.learn-html-tutorial.com/Images/FormattedTable.gif

(assuming the data is the same in both pics above)